Consumer sentiment at an all time low. Corporate profits at an all time high 15% share of GDP. Employee compensation below 10% of GDP. Prices soaring, choice falling. Something has to change. Freedom and liberty can still be restored.

This is wonky, but as it is forecast to hit above 100F here in Boston this week, I plan on digging in and reading this really great report/policy vision that explains how a better world is possible. This is the kind of engaged applied social science that I love!

I was reading this nodding along and realized at some point, awhile back, I had no clue what it was talking about. But I was still enjoying it.

This was interesting to read. For quantitative analysis AI simply does most of the work when prompted now. Once you see it and believe it, the really interesting questions discussed in this article take on considerable urgency. It’s uncharted territory which is exciting to think about and very easy to get lost in.

I appreciate the technical content being put out by Lander Analytics. Consistently great stuff, on the cutting edge, thoughtfully presented. I use DuckDB all the time and read the official post about the Quack protocol, but this article made some practical recommendations that clicked for me.

This is a fun retrospective on technology. It’s good to stop amid the hype and hyperbole of the tech industry and take the wider view. Humbling and inspiring and grounding.

An awesome well thought out and detailed way to approach using AI assisted coding agents to give back to open source projects in a way that is pro-social. The key - start small and participate! Great advice.

Getting around to reading this and struck by the excellent language of surrender and choice. I am tempted to replace my writing with AI because it is hard for me and I’m not great at it, but I know the only way to get better is to suffer from through. I feel no problem farming out many coding chores to AI because I know what needs to be done and it is an issue of volume, not accuracy or novelty. Still, it’s an evolving dialogue in my work!

This article is talking about hundreds of thousands of armed drones, some autonomous, some not. A truly chilling way in which the future is already here.

This is a great quick read thinking about what the impact on open source software communities has been and will be when contributing code is easier but also less necessary. Helpful as a mirror to think about my own engagement with open source in the past and moving forward. How can I be a more intentional and productive contributor, not just a consumer?

I get the criticism and resistance to AI, but its a fact that software is critical to modern life. What is happening to the cost and pace of software output now is revolutionary not evolutionary. This is a well-written explanation, with interesting evidence, of the implications this has on the pace of change in fields where software matters. It mirrors my own experience; AI does not eliminate bottlenecks, it moves them, and it is not well suited to solve those new bottlenecks - like judgment.

I really enjoyed this thoughtful and detailed description of how to do ELO-style team head to head results forecasting and structure it within the World Cup tournament format. I think head to head forecasting has wider applicability in social science…

Ms. Rachel is truly inspiring to me. Refusing to let children in immigration detention go unheard and unseen. She is using her profile and image so effectively and with such empathy and love. Truly powerful.

This is the self-hosted backend I am using to syndicate my posts across my social media accounts - it is super easy to set up and incredibly well documented.

I think the folks at Lander Analytics do really interesting cutting edge work and share a generous amount of what they learn. My own experience using a MacStudio for multiple side by side models is similar, but I need to look into these time series models more!

They raised taxes to pay for a temporary jail for the World Cup and it won’t be ready to open until the tournament is over. There’s always a jail angle.

My former colleague at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, Dr. Carl Bryan, has launched a newsletter and the list of topics sound like everything I love:

• Democracy and democratic participation • Education policy and public schools • School boards and local governance • Critical theory and public life • Queer liberation and belonging • Humanization, resistance, and public institutions • Current events viewed through questions of power and participation

Can’t wait to follow along

This interests me for three reasons: 1) it is the kind of ambitious policy vision we need to see; 2) it models its assumptions and clearly explains them; 3) there are no notable US politicians speaking at the World Inequality Conference. We need leaders who are relevant voices in exactly these conversations.

An AI harness for research. I have not tried it out because it seems far too optimized on writing papers which is not my primary output anymore.

I’m not surprised by the finding that even among AI users, code harnesses are not used. But if you are not finding value from AI for writing quantitative analysis code and research communication outputs its probably because you aren’t using a coding harness like OpenCode or Claude Code.

It’s important to remember that the most popular and accessed article about ChatGPT and student learning was retracted. The thing is, retraction is just a label, and people can choose to honor or not honor that label. So keep your eyes out for people citing the study.

When I was in grad-school it was trendy to call these FUQs - fundamentally unidentifiable (or unanswerable) questions. This is a much more nuanced, engaging, and useful take on how to approach a problem where your variables of interest can’t be varied.

Anil Dash is one of my favorite writers about technology. And this is why you will no longer see any Civilytics or Jared Knowles content on Twitter/X - I deleted all our posts after reading this article.

Simon Wilison has lots of great insights, and this one mirrors what I am finding. I am picking up a lot of “engineering” skills on the fly, while I am working on “vibe coding” things that I couldn’t deploy on my own in the past, but that I feel like I know very well what they should look and feel like.

Per Engzell and Nathan Wilmers provided some real insight on experiments with how well LLMs can produce quantitative social science paper production, even held back by using Stata of all things.

This is an interesting project I am tracking. There are so many AI agent harnesses, but harnesses make such a difference in the capabilities and usefulness of the tools. Particularly smaller LLMs really benefit from strong harnesses. Could be super useful!

Fascinating to see people using AI to replicate the work of academia. I saw some interesting critiques asking if this means papers never were and should not be moving forward the primary unit of output. I think that’s an interesting question.

A client-server protocol for DuckDB could really unlock a lot of agentic data science workflows for me - collaborating on the same database without running into conflicts or waiting in line to push updates.